


Get up, Prime

by Delirious21



Category: Transformers (Bay Movies)
Genre: Hopeful Ending, Lost Hope, Mass Grave, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-29
Updated: 2019-12-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:41:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22021981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delirious21/pseuds/Delirious21
Summary: Optimus Prime finds himself dumped in an Autobot mass grave after years of war, his only remaining ally a young human. Sentinel Prime and Megatron successfully enslaved Earth and reign over it.Just a short little thing spawned from boredom.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 23





	Get up, Prime

The last thing Optimus Prime remembered clearly was fleeing Chicago, separated from his Autobots and hunted by Sentinel’s soldiers. They’d failed, Cybertron’s atmosphere, and bits of her surface, had merged with Earth, and the Decepticons reigned chaos. After that, everything was a blur. Three years gone. And then he was waking up, paralyzed from the neck down, surrounded by piles and piles of dead mechs. Something moved beneath him, right at his spark, but he couldn’t arch his neck enough to see. 

For hours, the brushing sensation of hands against his armor remained. The sun set and, not long after, a young human was scurrying out from under him. She glanced up to the sky when a set of surveillance drones approached, their relentless buzzing alerting her. The child returned to Optimus and tucked herself under the cave produced by his arm pinned against his body. She hunkered down, head low and retreated beneath junk until the whirr of the drone’s engine faded into nothing. Even then, all she did was roll onto her back and cry. Cry and punch, kick, sounds safely muffled by the bulk of his body. Dust and paint flakes fell and clogged her throat, burnt her eyes, but she only stopped when he moved. He didn’t mean to, was only testing the remaining functions of his frame to distract himself from her pain, but it must have been a residual jolt, a delayed reaction of the synapses to being paralyzed. A last fight for life. After all, his core power was pooled in his spark, struggling to keep it warm. So, when his body creaked and his arms scuffed the ground, the child scrambled out from under him and retreated to another corpse. An Autobot, surely, or a rogue. This, after all, was a mass grave for Sentinel’s challengers. How it’d taken him so long to get here was beyond him. 

Optimus tried to move again but nothing happened. Inefable pain, shredding old wounds, the ache of infections of a crushed spark, it was almost enough to make him think about ending it. Cutting the power supply to his spark. But the child returned, shadowed brown eyes, dry dirt and energon making her look like a sparkling he’d seen, in the early days of the war, pulled from the rubble of a collapsed building, not quite dead, but fading fast. Sam and Micheala, he thought, if they’d had a child, perhaps that is what she would look like. Fiery, passionate, surviving. She poked her head around the fallen corpse. 

“Can you speak?” she called.

He wheezed, ventilation organs punctured by sharp edges of his broken internal frame. Trying to speak came out as a hiss and whine of systems failing to reboot. Static spitting. He could barely open his mouth, let alone close it to frown.

The child inched closer, a broken pipe in hand. He hoped she hadn’t removed it from a body. “Get up.” When he couldn’t respond, she lowered the pipe and approached his helm. Stopping right in front of his face, she whispered, “I can help you. I can try, at least.”

And, to her credit, she did try. For three days straight she welded (not very well) wounds, removed shrapnel, and sealed energon lines. Her fingers were bloody and scraped, nails broken and peeling, but she kept at it. Bullet after bullet, she worked meticulously to clear his spark of shards. Optimus flashed in and out of conscious, and when he woke next she’d moved to his spine, attempting to free the paralyzed nerve set. It hurt, worse than when the shots were fired, but he bit through it. When, against his will, a groan slipped past his dentae or he jolted from the pain, she paused her work and smoothed her small hands over the dip of his spine, comforting. It was an odd gesture, but not unwelcome. 

And on days when her hands were too sore to work, she scavenged parts for repairs. Optimus’ voice gradually returned to him, and so did his movement. He could move just the tips of his digits, but it was noticeable. The girl sat back on her heels and commanded him through simple exercises. At night she foraged for dead mech’s energon and food for herself. The second-hand energon made him sick, but he tried to keep it down. He needed it, and desperately.

One night as she worked, the girl asked, “Do you think I’m dangerous?”

Optimus, throat still partially collapsed, rapsed, “The potential within you is. Human capacity for violence is. . .”

She cut him off, “Your race isn’t violent? Hasn’t destroyed lives, flattened cities? You can’t generalize a group’s actions to the individual. If you did, we’d all be killers.”

A pang in his spark ached, and he wasn’t certain it was from his wounds. “Are we not?”

The girl grumbled something under her breath. “Hold still,” she said, taking pliers and removing a nasty bit of fractured metal that was lodged in Optimus’ helm. 

She slipped and the shard sliced the palm of her hand open. She huffed frustration but just wrapped a dirty rag around it and focused on cleaning out Optimus’ wound. Energon and blood seeped through the rag, mixing. The combination was fascinating to Optimus, a physical representation of the profound bond he’d shared with a select few humans. All dead.

The girl, satisfied with her clean-up job, held up her hand. “You better not give me some weird alien AIDS.” After a moment, she added, “There’s rumor going ‘round that there’s inner turmoil between Sentinel and Megatron.”

Optimus looked away. “Decepticons will never live in harmony with one another.”

“Could give you an opening.”

“And what would I do?”

“Fight. If you won’t, who will?”

“What is there left to fight for? Sentinel, Megatron, they’ve won. I am scrap metal with a voice. And without my Autobots. . . “

“But what if you’re wrong and there’s a change you win, but all you do is lie here and wait to rust? What about all the lives you could save, all the deaths you could give value to?”

Optimus shuttered his optics. “Please, enough. I must rest.”

The girl punched the side of his face, barely a flutter on his cheek. “Rest? What else have you been fucking doing? The longer you lay here and mope, the more people, innocent people, die.”

Another week passed by in a blur of old car batteries and dead mech’s energon, and Optimus could no longer find the energy to open his optics, let alone argue with the human “repairing” him. And yet, she remained, perhaps finding solace in the presence of another living being. 

On one of the nights when there were no drones in sight, she sprawled out on the dirt in front of him and watched the stars for hours, jaw set in a hard line, unmoving. Only when the faint thud of heavy footsteps rang out did she scurry back. 

“Shit, shit, shit,” she swore as she hunkered down beneath Optimus. She pressed flush against his chassis, back shielding the faint glow of his spark. “Someone’s coming.”

Optimus listened only halfheartedly, awaiting death. Instead, he heard his own name being called. The voice was familiar, richly so, and he allowed himself to open his optics and peer into the dark. In the distance, the silhouette of hope approached, drawn closer by the light of his optics. 

“Optimus?” the voice whispered. 

Warmth bloomed in his chassis and he ached to move, to run to his old friend, but all he could manage was digging his digits into the earth. “Ratchet?” he rasped. “Over here!”

Ratchet ran the rest of the way. “Optimus? Thank Primus.” He wedged his servos under the crook of Optimus’ arms and lifted. 

“Careful,” he coughed, “I am still partially paralyzed, and there is a human beneath me.”

Saw arm immediately activating, Ratchet growled, “A spy?”

“No, a child.” Optimus could still feel her meager body heat against his chassis. “Come out, girl.”

She didn’t respond and didn’t move, so Ratchet knelt to get a better look. She pressed harder back against Optimus, small hands clinging to the edges of his armor. 

“What is your name, child?” he asked. 

“You first,” she snapped.

“I am Ratchet, an Autobot medical officer.”

The girl creeped out, one hand still tight on the crumbling edge of Optimus’ armor. “Can you fix him?”

Ratchet frowned. “Possibly, but we need to move him, quick. The others neutralized the guards, but we don’t have all the time in the world.”

“Everyone is alive?” Optimus rasped, knowing all too well that only a handful of mechs would meet him upon his return. It wasn’t a new pain, but it still stung. 

“Let’s get you up,” Ratchet muttered. He lifted Optimus, practically draping him over his shoulders and back. He glanced back at the girl. “Come on.”

She jogged alongside Ratchet, but when Optimus’ helm lolled to the side, she held fierce eye contact and shouted, “You don’t have any excuses left now, Prime.”


End file.
